Category Archives: Comics

For my third “book” of the year, I selected to read a comic that I have been wanting to look at for some time: Don Rosa’s The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck. For this, I have been the subject of incessant teasing from my wife who keeps asking me why I am reading those “duck comics”. Since this isn’t a novel and comics are faster to read, I read both the original Life and Times stories (written 1992-1994) as well as the official “companion” stories which were written as one-offs between 1988 and 2006. All in all, it’s more than 400 pages of comics and supplementary material, so I think it counts.

So, why am I reading “duck comics”? As a kid, I was a fan of Ducktales (1987-1990) and those stories featured the adventures of Scrooge McDuck with his great-nephews, Huey, Dewey, and Louie, as well as a cast of other characters. Unknown to me at the time, Ducktales was based in large part on the “Duck Universe” established in comics, especially those by Carl Barks. (Originally a Disney animator, he worked on Disney comics from the 1940s to the 1970s.) It was during his run on these comics that Mr. Barks created the character of Scrooge McDuck as a one-off in Christmas 1947 (“Night on Bear Mountain”), but the character became a breakout star and eventually was fleshed out with his own universe of eccentric supporting characters.

In the next couple of weeks, over on The Adventure Gamer, I will be playing Seastalker. I mentioned this earlier in my review of a Hardy Boys mystery, and I am presently working my way through stories featuring Tom Swift, Jr. and Nancy Drew. All of these young-adult novels were written by Jim Lawrence, but you would never know it from their covers. Jim was a dedicated ghostwriter, creating fiction that he would never get credit for. Nonetheless, I have become quite interested in his history and have started to pull together a bibliography of his books based on various sources that I found online. This is most likely not a complete list. This is made more complicated by the fact that there are at least three authors named Jim (or James) Lawrence, including one artist who worked in comics. Trying to separate out which Mr. Lawrence wrote what has been quite a challenge!

That’s where you come in. Do you know of any additional works by Jim Lawrence? Do you have details of specific radio play scripts that he wrote? If so, please drop me a note below. For everyone else, here is the list that I have gathered so far:

Over the past two years or so, I’ve found myself with an unexpected hobby: reading every Marvel Silver Age comic in order. I’m not doing it quickly, but when I would tuck in my son at night or have a few minutes in a waiting room with nothing else to do, I’d fire up Marvel Unlimited and continue this trek. What I found was occasionally frustrating, frequently amazing, and all very eye-opening. So much of the current Marvel media boom started right here, in the early 1960s.

It’s a great trip through some of the most formative comic books of all time. Read on for more.

For Marvel Comics, every fan knows that the Silver Age began with the release of Fantastic Four #1 in November, 1961. But even as Mister Fantastic and his family were taking to the streets, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby were retiring their first unsuccessful attempt at a modern serialized super hero: Doctor Droom, later known as Doctor Druid.

So who was this unknown super-failure? And why did he fail? Well, read on for more.